Millimeter-scale 3D superlattice arrays composed of dense, regular, and vertically aligned gold nanorods are fabricated by evaporative self-assembly. The regular organization of the gold nanorods into a macroscopic superlattice enables the production of a plasmonic substrate with excellent sensitivity and reproducibility, as well as reliability in surface-enhanced Raman scattering. The work bridges the gap between nanoscale materials and macroscopic applications.

We study how the presence of committed vaccinators, a small fraction of individuals who consistently hold the vaccinating strategy and are immune to influence, impact the vaccination dynamics in well-mixed and spatially structured populations. For this purpose, we develop an epidemiological game-theoretic model of a flu-like vaccination by integrating an epidemiological process into a simple agent-based model of adaptive learning, where individuals (except for those committed ones) use anecdotal evidence to estimate costs and benefits of vaccination. We show that the committed vaccinators, acting as "steadfast role models" in the populations, can efficiently avoid the clustering of susceptible individuals and stimulate other imitators to take vaccination, hence contributing to the promotion of vaccine uptake. We substantiate our findings by making comparative studies of our model on a full lattice and on a randomly diluted one. Our work is expected to provide valuable information for decision-making and design more effective disease-control strategy.

Intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD) is a common degenerative disease of the musculoskeletal system and is also the main cause of chronic low back pain (LBP), which seriously affects the quality of life of patients and places a huge economic burden on families and society. [1][2][3] It is estimated that about 20% of adolescents have mild IDD and 80% of the general population will experience back pain symptoms during their lifetime. 4 However, the specific pathogenesis of IDD is still not fully understood. At present, IDD is believed to be a complex cell-mediated process that ultimately leads to changes in intervertebral disc (IVD) structure and function. 5

Facing the threats of infectious diseases, we take various actions to protect ourselves, but few studies considered an evolving system with competing strategies. In view of that, we propose an evolutionary epidemic model coupled with human behaviors, where individuals have three strategies: vaccination, self-protection and laissez faire, and could adjust their strategies according to their neighbors' strategies and payoffs at the beginning of each new season of epidemic spreading. We found a counter-intuitive phenomenon analogous to the well-known Braess's Paradox, namely a better condition may lead to worse performance. Specifically speaking, increasing the successful rate of self-protection does not necessarily reduce the epidemic size or improve the system payoff. The range and degree of the Braess's Paradox are sensitive to both the parameters characterizing the epidemic spreading and the strategy payoff, while the existence of the Braess's Paradox is insensitive to the network topologies. This phenomenon can be well explained by a mean-field approximation. Our study demonstrates an important fact that a better condition for individuals may yield a worse outcome for the society.

This study aimed to find potential diagnostic markers for osteoarthritis (OA) and analyze the role of immune cells infiltration in this pathology. We used OA datasets from the Gene Expression Omnibus database. First, R software was used to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and perform functional correlation analysis. Then least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) logistic regression and support vector machine-recursive feature elimination algorithms were used to screen and verify the diagnostic markers of OA. Finally, CIBERSORT was used to evaluate the infiltration of immune cells in OA tissues, and the correlation between diagnostic markers and infiltrating immune cells was analyzed. A total of 458 DEGs were screened in this study. GRB10 and E2F3 (AUC = 0.962) were identified as diagnostic markers of OA. Immune cell infiltration analysis found that resting mast cells, T regulatory cells, CD4 memory resting T cells, activated NK cells, and eosinophils may be involved in the OA process. In addition, GRB10 was correlated with NK resting cells, naive CD4 + T cells, and M1 macrophages, while E2F3 was correlated with resting mast cells. In conclusion, GRB10 and E2F3 can be used as diagnostic markers of osteoarthritis, and immune cell infiltration plays an important role in the occurrence and progression of OA.

No abstract

A modified spatial prisoner's dilemma game with voluntary participation in Newman-Watts small-world networks is studied. Some reasonable ingredients are introduced to the game evolutionary dynamics: each agent in the network is a pure strategist and can only take one of three strategies (cooperator, defector, and loner); its strategical transformation is associated with both the number of strategical states and the magnitude of average profits, which are adopted and acquired by its coplayers in the previous round of play; a stochastic strategy mutation is applied when it gets into the trouble of local commons that the agent and its neighbors are in the same state and get the same average payoffs. In the case of very low temptation to defect, it is found that agents are willing to participate in the game in typical small-world region and intensive collective oscillations arise in more random region.PACS numbers: 02.50. Le, 87.23.Kg, 87.23.Ge, 89.75.Hc There has been a long history of studying complex behaviors qualitatively of biological, ecological, social and economic systems using special game models. After the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) was first applied by Neumann and Morgenstern [1] to study economic behavior, great developments have been made by a lot of subsequent studies. Recently, more and more attentions have been focused on the applications of the PDG in the fields of biology [2], economy [3], ecology [4], and other domains [5]. Game theory and evolutionary theory provide a powerful metaphor for simulating the interactions of individuals in these systems [6].Most realistic systems can be regarded as composing of a large number of individuals with simple local interactions. For example, human beings are limited in territory and interact more frequently with their neighbors than those far away. Therefore, the spatial structure may greatly affect their activities. Since Axelrod [7] suggested ideas of the PDG on a lattice, spatial prisoner's dilemma games (SPDG) have been extensively explored in various kinds of network models in the past few years, including regular lattices [8,9,10], random regular graphs [11], random networks with fixed mean degree distribution [12], small-world networks [13,14,15] and realworld acquaintance networks [16], etc. In the general SPDG, each agent can take one of two strategies (or states): cooperator (C) and defector (D). There are four possible combinations: (C, C), (C, D), (D, C) and (D, D), which get payoffs (r, r), (s, t), (t, s), and (p, p), respectively. The parameters satisfy the conditions t > r > p > s and 2r > t + s, so that lead to a so-called dilemma situation where mutual trust and cooperation is beneficial in a long perspective but egoism and guile can produce big short-term profit. Agents update their states by imitating the strategy of the wealthiest among their neighborhoods in subsequent plays. The system is easy to get into an absorbing state: all agents are D for large values of t, which is known as the tragedy of the commons [17].Recently, Szabó ...

We study a modified prisoner's dilemma game taking place on two-dimensional disordered square lattices. The players are pure strategists and can either cooperate or defect with their immediate neighbors. In the generations each player updates its strategy by following one of the neighboring strategies with a probability dependent on the payoff difference. The neighbor selection obeys a dynamic preferential rule, i.e., the more frequently a neighbor's strategy was adopted by the focal player in the previous rounds, the larger probability it will be chosen to refer to in the subsequent rounds. It is found that cooperation is substantially promoted due to this simple selection mechanism. Corresponding analysis is provided by the investigation of the distribution of the players' impact weights, persistence, and correlation function.